Helpdesk

Dear Drugs-Forum readers: We are a small non-profit that runs one of the most read drug information & addiction help websites in the world. We serve over 4 million readers per month, and have costs like all popular websites: servers, hosting, licenses and software. To protect our independence we do not run ads. We take no government funds. We run on donations which average $25. If everyone reading this would donate $5 then this fund raiser would be done in an hour. If Drugs-Forum is useful to you, take one minute to keep it online another year by donating whatever you can today. Donations are currently not sufficient to pay our bills and keep the site up. Your help is most welcome. Thank you.

A series of amide derivatives of long-chain fatty acids has been studied for their effects on the proliferation of cancer cells in vitro. Fatty acids ranged from palmitic to higher polyunsaturated types containing 22 carbon atoms. The amino portions of the molecules included ammonia, ethanolamine, various amino acids and dopamine. Several cell lines were used as models and these included HTB-125 (normal human breast cells), HTB-126 (human breast cancer cells), HeLa (cervical cancer cells), WI-38 (human embryonic lung cells), RAW264.7 (mouse macrophage tumor cells) and RBL-2H3 (rat basophilic leukemia cells). The HTB lines were obtained from the same donor, so, could be considered a matched pair, that is, normal control versus cancer cells and thus, provide a model for testing speciﬁcity of action for the acylamido analogs. While many compounds were efﬁcacious in inhibiting the proliferation of various cell lines, only two analogs showed a high degree of speciﬁcity in the matched HTB cell lines. N-palmitoyl dopamine and N-palmitoyl tyrosine each demonstrated complete speciﬁcity of action at a concentration of 10 lM and were highly efﬁcacious in both cases. No clear structure–activity pattern could be derived from these studies since the intensity of the inhibitory action seemed to depend on three factors, namely, the fatty acid, the amine group and the cell type.